Or was she being paranoid? She had plenty of reason to be; and hadn't J.T. said that it was, after all, a healthy enough emotion if it kept you from cold, shocking surprise blows to the blind side? Like O'Rourke's sudden power grab. Like Otto's uncharacteristic tent-folding act. She wanted to scream at him for letting it all happen. The forces had been aligned against him while his wife was dying, and they said sharks lived only in oceans. And then Otto had had the audacity to say that he more or less admired O'Rourke for her cunning and her timing. Was that because Otto himself was a well-timed, cunning devil himself? Like his showing up the night before when she would never have turned him away?
She was still angry with him for implying that her interest in him had only to do with her ambition.
These thoughts crowded out her attention to her work, and she realized that she was becoming too fatigued to carry on. She'd performed the autopsy on Lowenthal as well as arranging for the various tests she'd wanted done. She now looked at her watch, and lunch felt like a distant vacation taken years before, save for the hurt she'd felt at Otto's thoughtless remark.
She peeled away her lab coat. Most of the areas of the lab were dark, the graveyard shift kept to a minimum along with the lights. She stretched and realized that a lab assistant in another room was staring through the glass at her and pointing to the phone. She only now realized the buzz in a nearby office was for her. She went to the phone and picked it up.
“ Call for Dr. Coran,” said a female voice.
“ Yes, this is she.”
“ Go ahead, sir.” After a moment's hesitation and the disappearance of the operator, a raspy voice came choking through, sounding nervous.
“ I saw you onnnnn TV. You… you are pretty.”
“ Who is this?”
“ I… I'm the vampire.”
“ Look, I'm in no mood for a crank-”
“ I take the blood in jars.”
“ Yes, well, thanks to the papers, everybody knows that.”
“ I use a modified tracheotomy tube and a tourniquet to control the blood flow, usually after severing the Achilles tendon.”
She shivered from deep within her soul. “The vampire killer is dead. Maurice Lowenthal-”
“ I killed Maurice. You know that… You're the only one who knows that.”
So you want me dead, she told herself. “Why're you telling me this?”
No one outside FBI circles knew of the tourniquet or the slashed heels.
“ / want some of your blood.'''
She tried to breathe normally, but found it near impossible. Now he was quoting from the letter he had written in Copeland's blood. Either she was speaking to Candy Copeland's killer, the man who treated his victims like swine to be bled, or someone was playing the kind of cruel, sick and senseless joke that police personnel loved the most.
“ I… I could give you some,” she said, unable to know where she found the words or the nerve.
“ You'll never know how happy you've made me to hear that.”
“ I mean… you could get blood from me when… whenever you needed, so-so”-she forced herself to control the fear-induced stuttering-”y-you wouldn't have to go on killing-”
“ You'd do that for me?”
“ For Teach, yes. I know you're ill, and you need help. I know you've got a disease.”
“ I know that you know. You know all about me.”
“ So we know all about each other. So where can I find you?”
“ No… no. I'll have to give this some thought.”
He hadn't expected her to react this way when he had planned the call. She could tell this from the inflection in his voice.
“ Don't hang”-he was gone-“up!”
She stood in the darkened office, fear gripping her on all sides. How did he get through to her? She felt defiled just having spoken with the perverted killer, as if he had touched her in some secret place.
Her hands were trembling; every nerve in her body felt as if touched by a hot wire, but she fought to remain in control. She drew on her training as an FBI agent. She had to contact someone about the phone call. It was too much to keep to herself, for any reason.
She rang for the operator, shouting her need.' 'The call to me just now. I need a tracer on that to determine the source. Can you do that?”
“ Yes, but it will take some time.”
“ Do it. It's very important, very.”
“ I'll get on it. We've got the new system that-”
“ Just do it, please.”
“ Yes, Dr. Coran.”
She was still trembling, feeling as if she needed a stiff drink, wishing that Otto was here with her now, someone she could throw herself at; she wanted to cry and to kick all at once. The very thing she hated most in this world had just spoken to her in what his bloody mind must constitute as intimacy. She wanted to snatch her. 38 from its holster and hold onto it for dear life, stretch it before her like a deadly shield of protection to ward off the evil.
People working in nearby offices were suddenly taking on evil dimensions, satanic form; everyone around her was suspect. Had the call come from within the building? Now the building itself had become a kind of evil working against her.
“ Got to get hold of myself,” she quietly said, trying desperately to calm her frayed nerves. It was one thing to hunt down a killer, but quite another when deadly, dangerous prey turned on you and stared you in the face. A police dispatcher called in telling her that the call was traced to a phone booth on the corner of Irving Park and Kedzie.
She next dialed long-distance for Otto, believing him most certainly back at HQ by now. She could not get him, and his fool secretary argued with her that he was still in Chicago. She became frustrated and asked to be routed to the lab in an attempt to reach J.T. But Robertson answered only to tell her that J.T. was gone for the evening.
“ Anything I can do for you?” he asked.
“ Yeah, as a matter of fact, there is.” She proposed that he get on a plane as quickly as possible and get to Chicago. She wanted him to confirm what she had found in the Lowenthal death, giving him just enough to whet his appetite. Robertson assured her that he was on his way, and he equally assured her that Otto Boutine, so far as he knew, had not returned to Quantico.
She hung up, feeling frustrated. She dialed for the Chicago offices of the FBI, asking for Brewer, only to leam that he was unavailable, something about investigating a case. One of Brewer's men got on with her, and she briefly recounted the conversation she had had with the killer, but this man, like everyone else in the Chicago law enforcement community, had long ago decided that the killer was dead.
“ Oh, you'll get hundreds of crank-heads calling, Dr. Coran, even a year from now-”
“ Just tell Brewer that this guy knew too much!”
She slammed down the phone in anger, taking it out on the agent.
Going from the floor and through the near empty building, she felt self-conscious, and she felt like a target, and she recalled how the sadistic bastard that had killed Candy Copeland had gone about his cruel work; she recalled it in its every vivid detail.
“ He's still out here somewhere,” she said to the bustling city night outside the Chicago Crime Lab where she hailed a cab. She had her gun with her, and for this she was grateful. She felt for it while in the cab, reassuring as it was to the touch, even in its ankle holster below her wide-legged, billowy slacks.
In a moment, she realized that the taxi driver was staring in his rearview at her and asking, “You okay, miss?”
“ Lincolnshire Inn, please,” she replied coldly.
“ Oh, great,” he replied, snapping on the meter. Now she was a good fare, and he no longer worried about her state of mind.
God, why hadn't Otto stayed with her??
TWENTY-SIX
It was 9 P.M. when the phone woke Jessica Coran from a less than sound sleep. She at first only half heard the voice at the other end of the line, thinking it was a wrong number.